Burnt Paper Sky

by Gilly MacMillan

  I can’t trust you with our son! You spend all your time texting instead of watching him

  Or you might enjoy this:

  Episode 237

  Admit you’re a bad mom and you can’t look after your children

  Just a thought. Up to you.

  Oh, and one more thing:

  Did you know Benedict Finch fractured his arm last year, and his mother didn’t get it treated? He must have been in a lot of pain. Guess she wasn’t bothered. Or perhaps she was just busy doing something else.

  RACHEL

  First thing in the morning, facing each other across my kitchen table in our dressing gowns, our eye contact patchy, the air between us oscillating with tension, Nicky told me that she was going to leave.

  ‘I think we probably both need some time,’ she said. It was a quiet statement, and a very controlled one, but it was also damp with the undercurrent of what we’d been through the day before.

  ‘Just for a day or two, then I’ll come back. Will you be OK do you think?’

  I had to clear my throat before replying in order to moderate my own tone and maintain the perfect neutrality of our exchange. The alternative was shouting, or weeping, or accusation, hastily spat out. After spending the night imagining darkly, now the sheer reality and familiarity of my sister’s presence and her own attempt at composure kept me in check.

  ‘OK,’ I said. ‘That’s fine.’

  ‘It’s the girls,’ she said, turning away, slotting bread into the toaster.

  ‘Of course you should go.’ And I did feel a twinge of guilt then, because Nicky’s girls needed her too.

  Steam billowed up from the kettle and settled in a moist coating on the front of one of my kitchen cabinets. Skittle dragged his cast laboriously across the floor and flopped heavily onto my feet. Nicky burned her toast and I watched her back as she took it to the sink and used a knife to scrape the black crumbs from it with sharp motions. They fell in a layer of coarse powder.

  ‘Cook some more,’ I said.

  ‘I wanted to leave some for you.’

  ‘It’s OK, I’ll have—’ I started to say.

  ‘You need to eat, Rachel!’ It was an outburst, her composure splintering abruptly, and she dropped her toast and the knife into the sink and leaned heavily on her palms on the edge of it, so that her shoulders became sharp points on either side of her bowed head. She looked up at the window and the darkness outside meant that her reflection was razor sharp in the glass and our eyes met in that way. She was the first to lower her gaze.

  ‘Sorry,’ she said. ‘I’m sorry. Can I show you something?’

  It was an email that had come from America during the night. Via the Missing Kids website, Nicky had contacted another family whose child had been abducted and they’d replied to her, a message of support.

  ‘Read it,’ said Nicky. ‘They understand.’

  She handed me her laptop. Two pages were up: one her blog, the other her email. I couldn’t help noticing that she’d updated her blog:

  ‘Dear Custard & Ketchup friends and followers,

  This is a heartfelt request for you to please bear with me just for now. I’m sorry to say I need to take a short break from blogging for family reasons. I was hoping to keep you busy with some new Tasty Halloween Treats, but that hasn’t been possible. If you’re looking for Halloween ideas my post from last year is available still and you’ll find lots of fun stuff to make and decorate there. Next to come: Christmas Cheer! Watch this space, I’ll be back as soon as I can…

  Nicky x’

  She saw me reading it. ‘Simon posted that. He updates it for me sometimes,’ she said, and then, ‘I’m wondering whether we should do a webpage for Ben. I could link to it from the blog.’

  I didn’t know what to say. I looked at my sister’s blog quite frequently, usually with some awe, especially at its mythologising and professionalising of family life. It was like a glossy food magazine, an enviable social diary. It was not my world.

  I clicked on the email instead.

  Email

  From: Ivy Cooper

  To: Nicola Forbes

  25 October 2012 at 23:13

  Re: Ben

  Dear Nicky

  BRETT’S LEGACY ‘DO SOME GOOD’

  This is a time of tremendous pain for you and your family. We are praying for Ben, and for your family.

  Our son Brett was taken from us seven years ago, and since then we’ve been through things that we never thought we would have to experience. Before he was taken from us, one of Brett’s favourite things to say was, ‘Mom, Let’s do some good,’ and we decided to make this a choice for our future, so that we could offer some help to other families who find themselves in the same situation.

  We made this decision five years ago, soon after Brett’s body was discovered, and…

  I stopped reading. I looked at my sister. ‘What happened to Brett?’ I said.

  ‘Have you read it all? Read to the end, you must. They actually understand what it’s like and it’s such a relief, honestly, I can’t tell you what a relief that is. I’ve been struggling so much to find anyone out there who knows what—’

  ‘What happened to him?’ I had to know. I didn’t like the email. I didn’t want to be part of this club: a family of devastated families. I wasn’t ready for that. Ben was going to come back to me. I wasn’t going to be like them.

  ‘It’s not relevant.’

  ‘It’s relevant to me.’

  ‘Brett died,’ Nicky said. ‘Unfortunately.’

  ‘How did he die?’

  ‘Rachel.’

  ‘How did he die?’

  ‘He was murdered, by his abductor. But that’s not the point, and they would never have found out what happened to him if the family hadn’t worked really hard to get the police to pursue the case.’

  ‘Ben’s coming back.’

  ‘I hope he is, God knows I do, you know I do –’ she was twisting a tea towel tight between her hands – ‘but we have to accept the possibility that he might not be back soon, that some harm might have come to him. It’s been six days.’

  I couldn’t hear it. Not from Nicky. Not from anybody. Not now. Not ever.

  ‘I’m going to see Ruth,’ I said.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ she said. ‘This wasn’t how I wanted this morning to go.’

  JIM

  When you work a case like this one, you long for a lead. When you get one, you’re all over it, and that’s how I felt about Nicola Forbes. I’d been ready to chase her to the end of the line.

  What you don’t expect is for something else just as strong to turn up, because then it’s a bit like being in a shooting range, trying to decide what to aim at, what’s a decoy and what’s real. Friend or enemy? Where should your sights land?

  You can’t always tell straight away, but sometimes you are presented with a clear and immediate threat, and it’s obvious that you must respond to that.

  That’s what happened on day six of the case. The letter arrived, and it changed the game completely.

  It came in the morning post. Postmark BS7, addressed to Fraser directly, at Kenneth Steele House. Fraser’s secretary opened it. Her scream could be heard out in the corridor at the far end of the incident room and she bolted out of her office.

  Fraser pulled us in straight away. The letter was in an evidence bag by then, and the secretary was already having her fingers inked next door so we could eliminate her prints. She was shaking and tearful, an extreme reaction for somebody who regularly got to file crime scene photographs.

  ‘Jim,’ Fraser said once we’d closed the door behind us. ‘Get John Finch in.’

  Emma was there too. She didn’t look as though she’d slept. Under her make-up her skin was dull and strained. To anybody else she probably looked more or less her usual self – a tired version of herself, of course – but I could see a few extra small signs of disarray. Her hair wasn’t tied up as neatl
y as usual, and her shirt didn’t look fresh. You can do that if you want to know every inch of somebody better than you know yourself. I wanted to put my arm around her, ask her if she was coping, but I couldn’t of course. Not there, not then.

  Emma’s phone rang just as Fraser finished filling us in. She glanced at it. ‘It’s Rachel Jenner, boss,’ she said. ‘Should I tell her?’

  ‘Nuh uh,’ said Fraser. ‘Not a word, not yet.’

  RACHEL

  Zhang agreed to come and give me a lift to the nursing home. She drove carefully and we didn’t talk.

  Sitting beside her in the silence, I felt, for the first time since Ben had gone, a sort of awakening, an impulse from within, which told me to lift my head up from the sand, to stop burrowing into my memories of Ben, and instead to look around me, to be more alert.

  I needed to consider people, to assess them, as a detective might, as Clemo might, and I needed to do it now. I’d placed my trust in my husband and my sister in the past, and both of them had proved themselves unreliable.

  I needed to consider my assumptions about life too.

  I’d also placed my trust in the veneer of a civilised society, the lie that is sold to us daily, which is that life is fundamentally good and that violence only happens to those who warrant it; it tarnishes only the trophy that’s already stained. That’s the same logic as the age-old accusation that a raped woman somehow deserves it, and based on that, without questioning it, I’d trusted that if Ben ran ahead of me in the woods then he would come to no harm, because I believed myself to be fundamentally good.

  And, worse, the betrayal had been a double one because Ben had also put his trust in me, in the way that children must, and so I’d failed him as well as myself: abjectly and possibly finally.

  I looked at Zhang’s hand on the wheel, her knuckles white as she gripped it firmly at ten to two, and I realised that beyond my first impressions I hadn’t before thought about who she really was, or what she might be like.

  ‘Do you have a family?’ I asked her as the car idled at a junction.

  ‘I have a mum and dad,’ she replied.

  ‘I mean children of your own?’ Though as I said it, I realised she was probably too young.

  ‘No.’ She shook her head. ‘I won’t have children for a while, if ever.’

  ‘Oh. You know that already?’

  ‘I do.’

  ‘Can I ask why?’

  ‘Because I’m not ready to be responsible for somebody else’s life yet.’

  She said it so simply that it gave me a frisson of shock because I realised that she already knew what I was only just working out – that we should look very carefully indeed before we leap, or believe, or trust – and that this younger woman had recognised that before I did only made me feel more foolish.

  I didn’t know how to respond so I fixated on what was around me. Outside the sky was the kind of grey that looks perpetual and heavy, and the clothing of the people in the street was flattened against them by a strong wind. I retreated back into silence and the slow unfurling of the thoughts in my head, where I was starting to doubt everything I ever thought I’d known.

  There was one consolation at that moment when everything weighed unbearably heavily and when suspicion was beginning to edge into every corner of my mind. It was that I was on my way to visit Ruth. I desperately wanted to see her because she was one of my favourite people in the world. Ever since Ben was a baby, she’d been a reassuring presence in my life, offering me gentle, unconditional support, and our friendship had grown alongside him.

  Life hadn’t been easy for Ruth. To those who didn’t know her she would appear dignified, proud and fragile, always chic in a uniform of dark clothes with a scarf neatly tied at her neck, a silky flash of colour. As a young woman, she’d had the talent to be a concert violinist, but she’d also felt things so deeply that they could wound her.

  Her violin playing had captivated John’s father. ‘I fell in love with her the first time I saw her play,’ Nicholas Finch would proudly tell everyone, in his Brummy accent. In fact most people who’d heard her play were entranced. She’d trained and performed on the instrument for years, but ultimately found public performance an intolerable pressure, and as a result, when she was in her twenties, shortly after marrying John’s father, she’d sunk deeply into the first of many bouts of deep depression that she suffered throughout her life.

  I first met Ruth in early 2003, a good year for her. She and Nicholas were enjoying his retirement. After a long career as a GP, which had kept him working all hours, finally having him around had helped Ruth remain stable. They were planning to buy a small apartment in the Alps, and they’d taken a successful trip the previous year to Vienna, to see the buildings and neighbourhoods that Ruth’s parents grew up in. Lotte and Walter Stern had been musicians too, both successful and well-respected performers before the war, but they’d become refugees, driven from Vienna after Kristallnacht, when Lotte Stern was heavily pregnant with her daughter.

  In the summer of 2003, John and I made our first visit together to his parents’ home in Birmingham. I found Ruth and Nicholas charming and welcoming. Their contrasting personalities intrigued me. Nicholas was a big, warm-hearted man with a kindly, relaxed manner, which had won him many friends amongst his patients during his years as a GP. His bonhomie was the opposite of Ruth’s nervous disposition, but she welcomed me cautiously.

  Ruth’s mother and father both died in 2004, and she took it hard. As a tribute to them, she preserved many of their traditions long after their deaths. Lotte Stern had kept a special white tablecloth just for making the delicate strudel pastry that she took much pride in. Ruth kept the tablecloth, and more than once made what we called ‘Lotte’s strudel’ with Ben, asking him to stir the filling while she showed him the methods she used to stretch and roll the wafer-thin pastry.

  In fact it was the tiny Benedict Finch, only 6lb 13oz when he was born in July 2004, who brought Ruth back to us after her parents’ death. She adored him instantly, she opened her arms to him and never wanted to let him go, and to all of our surprise, she included me in that embrace. Right after Ben’s birth, she came to stay and she helped me through the difficult first weeks and months, and then she never stopped helping. She became a companion to me, a friend and a wonderful grandmother to Ben.

  John told me a story about Ruth once. It was a rare confidence about his childhood that he told me just after I’d met her. I think he wanted to explain her to me. It was a story that showed her darkness and her light.

  When John was about nine years old, he’d gone to see Ruth after school. It was during one of her periods of depression, and he was ushered quietly into her darkened bedroom to show her a prize that he’d won that day.

  Ruth examined his certificate, and then propped it up on her bedside table. She patted the bed beside her. It was a rare invitation and John sat down carefully, desperate not to break the moment, daring to do nothing more than glance around the room, which the drawn curtains had given a chiaroscuro quality, so it felt to him as if he and his mother were drawn characters in a children’s book.

  ‘Where I am weak,’ she said to him that afternoon, ‘you can be strong. Like your father.’

  She held his hand tenderly, examining with the tips of her fingers each of his. He remembered that sensation. Then she spoke to him of music. John explained to me that when Ruth was drained of life, she seemed always to have music left in her, and it was this that was her gift to him, even when she lacked the energy to get him up, make his packed lunch, or take him to school in the morning.

  After sitting with his mother until she was too tired to talk any more, John left her room with his little heart beating, relieved to escape her intensity yet longing for more of it.

  When we arrived at the nursing home, Zhang said she’d wait in the car.

  Ruth was in her room. It was a generous size, one of the nicer rooms upstairs, with large windows overlooking a garden and some mature t
rees below. It was a thousand times nicer than some of the grey and murky spaces we’d looked around before placing Ruth here.

  Those homes were like holding pens, where residents waited for death with little more status than corpses. Loneliness, confusion, pain and the smell of urine and boiled food seemed to be their only companions as the light faded on their lives. Those places had made me shudder, and sometimes weep.

  Carpe diem was the lesson to be learned. It’s what I had been trying to teach Ben when I let him run ahead in the woods. Seize the day – be brave – be independent – be thoughtful – don’t be scared to make mistakes – keep learning – all of those things, all the time. And somebody had taken him. More fool me.

  Ruth’s chair was turned to face the window. Her hand rested on its arm, her arthritic knuckles gnarled and inflamed, her fingers resting at unnatural angles. Macular degeneration was starting to steal her vision and she had to keep her head at a sideways angle to see me properly. Somebody had done her make-up, there was rouge on her waxy skin, a smudge of the bright lipstick she’d always favoured.

  Classical music was playing softly and I was relieved to see that it was a CD as John had requested, and there was no sign of her radio so there was no chance of her hearing about Ben on the news.

  ‘Rachel,’ she said. ‘Darling.’ She reached for my hands with her own and cupped them stiffly, a favourite gesture of hers.

  ‘Where’s Ben?’ she said. ‘I missed you on Wednesday. People think I know nothing any more but I do know when it’s Wednesday.’

  She was putting a brave face on it, attempting to maintain her dignity, but I knew from her carers that her agitation had been more extreme than she was letting on. She was also more lucid than I’d expected, and I didn’t know whether to be grateful for that or not.

  ‘He wanted to try chess club,’ I said. ‘I was planning to bring him over here after it finished, but he was feeling poorly when I collected him. I’m sorry. I should have phoned.’