Burnt Paper Sky

by Gilly MacMillan

  When they’d got me upright and they were sure I wasn’t going to faint again, they moved me into the classroom and sat me in the teacher’s chair.

  Miss May was there, and also the teaching assistant. I heard Zhang’s voice, saying, ‘She wants his things, that’s all, that’s why we’re here.’

  I watched Miss May go over to a row of pegs that ran along one wall of the classroom, and take down the only PE bag that remained there, and behind it there was a label. It was a photograph of a dog, black and white like Skittle, and the name ‘Ben F’.

  Then Miss May said, ‘Lucas, can you please get…⁠’ and I watched the teaching assistant go into the corridor and carefully take down Ben’s painting from the autumn display and put it into a plastic folder. Noticing his receding chin and very red hair. Noticing the sweat under his arms.

  Then Miss May was offering to help me to the car, but I found my voice and said no, because I didn’t want the fuss of it, and Zhang said we could manage just fine.

  Outside in the corridor, with her arm linked firmly around mine, we walked past the new headmaster. He said, ‘I’m so sorry,’ but the way he looked at me made me feel like an exhibit so I didn’t reply. I just wanted to be at home.

  Miss May ran down the corridor behind us, her shoes tapping fast, and just as we reached the door she caught up with us. She had an armful of Ben’s books, which she passed to me, and she said ‘I thought you might like these, since you didn’t make it to parents’ evening this week. I thought you might like to look through them.’

  So I took them and as Zhang helped me into the car I held them to myself as carefully as if they were an actual baby.

  JIM

  Addendum to DI James Clemo’s report for Dr Francesca Manelli.

  Transcript recorded by Dr Francesca Manelli.

  DI James Clemo and Dr Francesca Manelli in attendance.

  Notes to indicate observations on DI Clemo’s state of mind or behaviour, where his remarks alone do not convey this, are in italics.

  FM: So the letter?

  JC: We threw everything into it. Obviously.

  FM: Was that your call?

  JC: It was Fraser’s, actually it was both of ours, and it was the right one.

  FM: Was the investigation team excited?

  JC: You’re always excited when you’ve got a lead, but you have to be cautious too. You don’t want mistakes. But it was a development and that was good because by then it had been five days and that was getting to people. They were tired; the media were going insane around us. We had the blog to worry about.

  FM: What was happening with that?

  JC: Behind the scenes Fraser was putting everything she could into finding out who might be behind it. Amongst others we were looking at Laura Saville and Nicola Forbes as possibles for the leak. We knew that both of them were involved in online journalism in some way already, and they were obviously close to the heart of things. She had to be discreet internally though, partly because we didn’t want to put the wind up anybody if they were up to something, and also because everybody working the investigation was feeling the pressure, and that kind of thing is very bad for morale, putting it mildly.

  FM: Including you? Were you feeling the pressure?

  JC: Of course. There was a kid’s life at stake.

  FM: And did you have any strategies to cope with that?

  He speaks to me as though I am an imbecile.

  JC: A little boy, eight years old, was still missing after five days. We didn’t have time for ‘coping strategies’.

  FM: OK. I understand that it must have been a stressful period for everyone involved in the investigation. My question is—

  He interrupts me; his temper has risen.

  JC: Don’t patronise me.

  FM: I’m not intending to. That’s a very defensive reading of what I said. I’m simply acknowledging the fact that you felt under pressure and looking at ways that we might explore what that meant for you, and for the investigation.

  JC: You have no idea what it’s like to be in the middle of something like that.

  FM: So would it be fair to say that by this point in the case you’d moved on from the attitude that you felt when you took on the case? The ‘bring it on’ attitude?

  JC: It would, yes, because have you ever thought about what five days of being removed from your family and living in fear could do to a child? That’s 120 hours and counting. That was on my mind every single second. Why do you think I threw a hand grenade into the middle of that family? Because that’s what it was, making Nicky Forbes confess that stuff to her sister, don’t think I don’t understand that. But I did that for Benedict. Because we had to find him, and if there was collateral damage, then so be it. The letter was no different.

  I end our session here, because I fear I’ll push him away entirely if I press him further today. I do wonder whether, if this man doesn’t successfully go through this process, and get back to work in CID, I might fear for his long-term stability.

  RACHEL

  When I got home, Zhang asked me if I wanted her to come in with me but I declined, saying that my sister would be there, even though I didn’t know if that was true. I still felt detached and strange as if all my senses were dulled and the only thing that mattered were the thoughts that were at a rolling boil inside my head.

  Nicky was there. She was sitting in the kitchen and her packed bag was by the front door, her coat draped over it.

  ‘I waited because I didn’t want to leave without saying goodbye,’ she said.

  She didn’t notice my disorientation. She did ask me what I was cradling in my arms.

  ‘Ben’s books,’ I said.

  I put them carefully down on the table and then we just stood facing each other and she reached forward to hug me. It was an awkward hug, just as it had been the first morning at the police station, although this time it was worse because her body offered none of the softness that it had before. We were both too wary of each other, and we made do with the minimum of contact, because for the first time in our lives neither of us knew where we stood with the other. And then, as if she knew that was inadequate, Nicky stood in front of me and put her hands on either side of my arms, and rubbed them up and down.

  ‘Will you be OK?’ she asked.

  I nodded.

  ‘I can come back whenever you want, just call me, if it’s too much being on your own.’

  ‘I can ask Laura to come over,’ I said, and my voice sounded strange, as if I were speaking with a thick tongue.

  She hesitated just slightly before saying, ‘OK, good.’

  Then we stood there again and her hands fell away from my arms and she looked at me in a way that made me want to start screaming with the uncertainty and the awfulness of it all, so with the last reserves of my strength I said, ‘Just go, Nicky.’

  ‘Now I’m not sure I should,’ she said. ‘Looking at you now. You’re not OK, are you?’

  And I shouted. I shouted, ‘JUST GO!’ because I felt as if I would implode if anybody said anything else to me, and it shocked her so much that she took a step back, and from her reaction I could tell that my expression must be ugly.

  She stared at me, and then started to say something, but I couldn’t stand to hear it, so I shouted ‘NOW!’ and it was more of a scream than a word, and then I ran up the stairs so fast that they pounded and I didn’t hear the sound of the door clicking shut behind her, but I did hear the press badgering her to tell them who had been shouting and why, and if she replied to them she did it very quietly or not at all, because within minutes all I could hear were the sounds of my empty house.

  Laura came to mop me up. I didn’t ask her to, she just arrived. As I went to answer the door I heard her chatting with one of the journalists on the doorstep. When I let her in she said, ‘How funny. I trained with one of those guys out there.’ She said it lightly, as if they’d run into each other at a party. I wondered which one of them it was. There were a few regulars. M
ost likely, I thought, to be the youngest of the bunch, the one who could outrun the others and was the last to stop beating on the windows of the car when I was driven away. I didn’t ask her.

  She’d brought takeaway food and a bottle of wine with her. Before she arrived I thought I’d tell her everything that had happened. But I didn’t. I couldn’t find the words, they felt trapped inside me, made prisoner by my numbed senses and my decaying ability to trust. Within my head I was jittering, like a withdrawing addict, obsessing over my sister, and what she’d told me, replaying my loss of consciousness at the school.

  Laura let me jitter. She calmly laid out our food on the kitchen table and poured us glasses of wine. ‘I know you probably don’t feel like this,’ she said, ‘but I’m going to do it anyway and I won’t be offended if you don’t want it.’

  The food and drink she’d brought looked like ancient relics of a life that I’d once enjoyed, but I went through the motions of appearing grateful. I picked at one or two of the dishes, managed just a sip of the wine, which had lost all of the comforting qualities it had before Ben disappeared and tasted like acid in my mouth.

  ‘Do you want to talk about him?’ Laura asked, breaking our silence. ‘Would it help?’

  Laura never ate much; she had the appetite of a sparrow. She toyed with her food for a few moments, while I failed to answer her question, and then she said, ‘Do you remember when you had him? At the very beginning? We couldn’t believe how tiny he was, do you remember that?’

  I found my voice. ‘You wouldn’t hold him at first.’

  Laura hadn’t been able to take her eyes off him when she came to see me in the hospital. I lay exhausted in the bed, my body bruised and sore, hormone-drenched and soft, and watched her while she’d stood beside his Perspex crib all trim and well dressed and tanned and pretty in a little summer dress and big sunglasses pushed up on her head – like a postcard from my life before motherhood. I told her she could pick him up, but she’d shaken her head at first.

  She smiled at the reminder. ‘I’d never held a baby before. I didn’t want to break him, or drop him.’

  ‘But I made you.’

  ‘And he puked on me.’

  ‘He puked everywhere for the first few months. It was constant washing.’

  ‘But it was love at first sight, wasn’t it? For you?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘I envied you that. It was so intense, so private.’

  Her fingers sat on the stem of her wine glass and she turned it slowly, delicate wrists flexing. Then she refilled it. More than half the bottle was gone, and I hadn’t had more than a sip.

  For the first time I noticed that lines were beginning to form on her elfin face. It was just an impression, they seemed to be there one moment, and gone the next, but they were a reminder that she was ageing, that we were all ageing. I stretched my hand across the table towards her and our fingers linked briefly.

  ‘I can’t believe this is happening to you,’ she said. ‘It’s like a bolt of lightning came out of nowhere and struck you, and Ben. I can’t imagine what you must be going through.’

  ‘All my feelings hurt.’

  Her eyes brimmed with unshed tears, and she said, ‘Can I tell you something? I want to say it so you know that other people know how you feel. Just a little bit of what you feel anyway.’

  ‘Tell me,’ I said, and instinctively I felt a reawakening of the feelings of dread that our reminiscences about Ben had briefly put to sleep.

  ‘I had an abortion.’

  ‘When?’ This was startling news, shocking too. I thought Laura and I had had the kind of friendship where you lay yourself bare, where the only secrets you keep are to do with your plans for each other’s Christmas or birthday presents.

  ‘Before you had Ben.’

  ‘I don’t know what to say. Why didn’t you tell me before?’

  ‘You were pregnant.’

  And there it was: a wedge in our friendship that I’d never known about.

  ‘Who was the father?’

  ‘Do you remember Tom from Bath?’

  I did. He was a married man, who she’d met through work.

  ‘Did he know?’

  ‘He paid for it. God, Rach, I’m sorry. It’s stupid of me even to mention it now. I don’t even know why I’m telling you. It’s nothing compared to what you’re going through.’

  And here’s the thing: I couldn’t deal with it. If Laura wanted us to feel solidarity at that moment then she’d just said completely the wrong thing. It was simply too much to cope with: the intentional loss of a child.

  A week previously I would have been there for her, supported her, but at that moment it was viciously, unbearably painful to hear, and my brain, addled with her news, with everything, did a flip.

  The exquisite and painful pleasure of our reminiscences about Ben disappeared in an instant. The earlier warmth of her friendship, and her company, suddenly felt frosty and brittle. Goose bumps ran across my skin like squalls agitating glassy water.

  ‘No,’ I said. ‘No, no, no. I can’t hear this now. Why are you telling me this?’

  And then another thought, a corrosive one, as the distrust that my sister had sown as a seed now bloomed freely in my mind. I voiced it with a tone that was raw enough to surprise even myself, the tone of somebody who has reached the end of her tether. ‘Are you feeding stories about me to the other journalists? To your friends out there? Is that why you wanted to talk about Ben?’

  I got to my feet, and my wine glass tipped over in my hurry to stand, the wine everywhere, pooling on the table, on me, dripping onto the floor and Laura stood too and shock had peeled away any softness in her expression so that her cheeks looked cold and smooth as marble.

  ‘Jesus, Rachel! I know you must be feeling desperate, but…⁠’

  I pushed her. She came around the table towards me, wanting to hug me, and I pushed her away. I grabbed her coat, and her bag and I shoved them at her and I hounded her all the way to the front door, ignoring her pleading words, and her tears, until she was out, and gone, like Nicky, and the press, her so-called friends, took photographs of her on the doorstep while I sat back down at the kitchen table, on the chair that was damp with wine, and I sobbed.

  JIM

  We worked closely with John Finch all day. The feeling of recognising myself in him didn’t abate, if anything it got stronger as we talked. It troubled me.

  He waited at Kenneth Steele House with me while my officers began checking out families who he’d identified for us. We sent a pair of DCs down to the hospital, hoping there weren’t going to be too many confidentiality issues and bureaucratic hoops to jump through before they would release information to us.

  ‘Do you ever tire of it?’ Finch said to me in a long moment of silence when my thoughts had flown to Emma, to when I might see her next. ‘Do you ever tire of the daily contact with people when their lives are shattered?’

  We sat in a windowless interview room around a grey-topped table. A strip light above us threw out a glare that made my temples ache. I didn’t answer him. If I had, I would have lost my separateness, my professional distance. I had to remember that John Finch was not my friend, but it was hard not to answer, because there were parallels between what he did and what I do. For a moment or two I was overwhelmed with a desire to say yes, to talk to him, to compare notes and admit that there were times when it was very, very difficult to stand back. In another universe, I thought, we might have been able to do that, and it would have been nice, but not here, not now.

  ‘Do you know what this room reminds me of?’ he asked.

  I shook my head.

  ‘We call it the bad news room at the hospital. It’s where we take families when we have to tell them the worst. It’s exactly like this, except that there are brochures.’

  I kept my reply neutral. ‘We’re hoping to bring you good news, Mr Finch.’

  ‘Do you know how they know?’ he said. ‘The smart ones, the clever fami
lies? They see the china teapot and the china cups with saucers, and the door closing behind them, and the unusual number of staff all together in one room, and they ask themselves why all this fuss, just for us? It doesn’t take them long to work it out. They read the situation before we’ve even started talking. They start to grieve before the milk goes into the cups.’

  ‘Well, you’re safe on that count,’ I said.

  In front of us was a tray of four polystyrene cups with grey coffee remains swimming in the base of them. Torn and half-emptied sachets of sugar littered the table like doll-sized body bags.

  He understood why I’d given such a shallow response. ‘I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘Of course you don’t want to have this conversation because to do so would be unprofessional. That was stupid of me. I’d do the same in your situation.’ He barked out a noise that was supposed to be a laugh, but instead was a noise that crept sullenly around the edges of the room, mocking his attempt at forced jollity.

  I wondered then if all the pain and difficulty of his profession, the hopelessness and the encounters with death, had become toxic for John Finch, too toxic to bear any longer.

  I let my guard down then, just for a moment, because I was curious.

  ‘Do you get emotional when you lose a patient?’ I asked him. I wanted to know how much failure hurt him; I wanted to know if he was like me.

  ‘Very occasionally there’s one that gets to you, no matter how hard you try. It’s very rare. You learn early on, when you’re training, that you have to keep your distance emotionally, because if you don’t, you can’t do your job.’

  ‘What makes that one stand out?’

  ‘Sometimes you don’t even know. Once I operated on a boy who reminded me a little of Ben, and I met his mother, she wasn’t unlike Rachel. They reminded me of us, of our family. It wasn’t that long ago, Ben was about seven at the time. The boy’s operation was quite a simple one, but there was bleeding, and he died. His heart failed. There was nothing we could do. It was an unexpected death and when I went to tell his mother, I… I’m afraid I broke down.’