What She Knew

by Gilly MacMillan

  DEDICATION

  To my family

  EPIGRAPH

  Whatever else is unsure in this stinking dunghill

  of a world a mother’s love is not.

  —James Joyce

  In a real dark night of the soul it is always three o’clock

  in the morning, day after day.

  —F. Scott Fitzgerald

  CONTENTS

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Author’s Note

  Prologue

  Day 1

  Day 2

  Day 3

  Day 4

  Day 5

  Day 6

  Day 7

  Day 8

  Day 9

  Epilogue

  Acknowledgments

  Bibliography

  P.S.

  About the book

  Read on

  About the author

  Credits

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  During the research for this novel I found a number of websites and papers to be very valuable resources. Although I have made some references to these sources within this book, What She Knew is entirely a work of fiction and all quotes and references are used fictitiously. Along with the characters and events in this novel, the blog posts, online comments and identities, newspaper articles, email addresses, and many of the websites are entirely fictitious, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or to actual websites, email addresses, online comments and identities, newspaper articles, and blog posts is entirely coincidental.

  Any mistakes in police procedure are mine, with apologies to the two retired detectives who kindly advised me. Bristol is as real as I could make it, although there is no playing field beside the Leigh Woods parking lot, and the descriptions of the interior of Kenneth Steele House are a product of my imagination.

  PROLOGUE

  NOVEMBER 2013—ONE YEAR AFTER

  RACHEL

  In the eyes of others, we’re often not who we imagine ourselves to be.

  When we first meet someone, we can put our best foot forward, and give the very best account of ourselves, but still get it horribly wrong.

  It’s a pitfall of life.

  I’ve thought about this a lot since my son, Ben, went missing, and every time I think about it, it also begs the question: if we’re not who we imagine we are, then is anybody else? If there’s so much potential for others to judge us wrongly, then how can we be sure that our assessment of them in any way resembles the real person that lies underneath?

  You can see where my train of thought’s going with this.

  Should we trust or rely on somebody just because they’re a figure of authority, or a family member? Are any of our friendships and relationships really based on secure foundations?

  If I’m in a reflective mood, I think about how different my life might have been if I’d had the wisdom to consider these things before Ben went missing. If my mood is dark, I find fault in myself for not doing so, and my thoughts, repetitive and paralyzing, punish me for days.

  A year ago, just after Ben’s disappearance, I was involved in a press conference, which was televised. My role was to appeal for help in finding him. The police gave me a script to read. I assumed people watching it would automatically understand who I was, that they would see I was a mother whose child was missing, and who cared about nothing apart from getting him back.

  Many of the people who watched, the most vocal of them, thought the opposite. They accused me of terrible things. I didn’t understand why until I watched the footage of the conference—far too late to limit the damage—but then the reason was immediately obvious.

  It was because I looked like prey.

  Not appealing prey, a wide-eyed antelope, say, tottering on spindly legs, but prey that’s been well hunted, run ragged, and is near the end. I presented the world with a face contorted by emotion and bloodied from injury, a body that was shaking with grief, and a voice that sounded as if it had been roughly scraped from a desiccated mouth. If I’d imagined beforehand that an honest display of myself, and my emotions, however raw, might garner me some sympathy and galvanize people into helping me look for Ben, I was wrong.

  They saw me as a freak show. I frightened people because I was someone to whom the worst was happening, and they turned on me like a pack of dogs.

  I’ve had requests, since it was over, to appear again on television. It was a sensational case, after all. I always decline. Once bitten, twice shy.

  It doesn’t stop me imagining how the interview might go, though. I envisage a comfortable TV studio, and a kindly looking interviewer, a man who says, “Tell us a little about yourself, Rachel.” He leans back in his chair, which is set at a friendly angle to mine, as if we’d met for a chat in the pub. The expression on his face is the sort that someone might make if they were watching a cocktail being made for them, or an ice-cream sundae if that’s your preference. We chat and he takes time to draw me out, and lets me tell my side of the story. I sound OK. I’m in control. I conform to an acceptable view of a mother. My answers are well considered. They don’t challenge. At no point do I spin a web of suspicion around myself by blurting out things that sounded fine in my head. I don’t flounder, and then sink.

  This is a fantasy that can occupy long minutes of my time. The outcome is always the same: the imaginary interview goes really well, brilliantly, in fact, and the best thing about it is that the interviewer doesn’t ask me the question that I hate most of all. It’s a question that a surprising number of people ask me. This is how they might phrase it: “Before you discovered that Ben had disappeared, did you have any intuition that something bad would happen to him?”

  I hate the question because it implies some kind of dereliction of duty on my part. It implies that if I were a more instinctive mother, a better mother, then I would have had a sense that my child was in danger, or should have. How do I respond? I just say “No.”

  It’s a simple enough answer, but people often look at me quizzically, brows furrowed in that particular expression where a desire to mine someone for gossip overwhelms sympathy for their plight. Softly crinkled foreheads and inquisitive eyes ask me, Really? Are you sure? How can that be?

  I never justify my answer. “No” is all they need to know.

  I limit my answer because my trust in others has been eroded by what happened; of course it has. Within many of my relationships doubt remains like slivers of broken glass, impossible to see and liable to draw blood even after you think you’ve swept them all away.

  There are only a very few people that I know I can trust now, and they anchor me to my existence. They know the whole of my story.

  A part of me thinks that I would be willing to talk to others about what happened, but only if I could be sure that they’d listen to me. They’d have to let me get to the end of my tale without interrupting, or judging me, and they’d have to understand that everything I did, I did for Ben. Some of my actions were rash, some dangerous, but they were all for my son, because my feelings for him were the only truth I knew.

  If someone could bear to be the wedding guest to my ancient mariner, then in return for the gift of their time and their patience and their understanding, I would supply every detail. I think that’s a good bargain. We all love to be thrilled by the vicarious experience of other people’s ghastly lives after all.

  Really, I’ve never understood why we haven’t thought of an English word for Schadenfreude. Perhaps we’re embarrassed to admit that we feel it. Better to maintain the illusion that butter wouldn’t melt in our collective mouths.

  My generous listener would no doubt be surprised by my story, because much of what happened
went unreported. It would be just like having their very own exclusive. When I imagine telling this fictional listener my story, I think that I would start it by answering that hated question properly for the first time, because it’s relevant. I would start the story like this:

  When Ben went missing I didn’t have any intuition. None whatsoever. I had something else on my mind. It was a preoccupation with my ex-husband’s new wife.

  JIM

  Here’s the list of everything I used to have under control: work, relationship, family.

  Here’s the problem I have now: the thoughts in my head.

  They remind me hourly, sometimes minute by minute, of loss, and of actions that can’t be undone, however much you wish it.

  During the week I throw myself into work to try to erase these thoughts.

  Weekends are more of a challenge, but I’ve found ways to fill them too: I exercise, I work some more, and then I repeat.

  It’s the nights that torment me, because then the thoughts revolve ceaselessly in my head and deny me sleep.

  When I was a student I gained a little knowledge of insomnia. I studied surrealist poetry and I read that sleep deprivation could have a psychedelic, hallucinogenic effect on the mind; that it had the potential to unleash reserves of creativity that were profound and could enhance your life and your soul.

  My insomnia isn’t like that.

  My insomnia makes a desperate, restless soul of me. There is no creativity, only hopelessness and frustration.

  Each night when I go to bed I dread the inevitability of this because when my head hits the pillow, however tired I am, however much I crave respite from my own mind, every single part of me seems to conspire to keep me awake.

  I become hyperaware of all the potential stimuli around me, and each one feels like an affliction.

  My shifting movements make the smooth sheet beneath me buckle and form ridges and channels like baked earth that’s been torn into by the claws of an animal. If I try to lie still, my hands linked together on my chest, then the pounding of my heart shortens my breath. If I lie without covers, the air in the room makes my skin prickle and crawl, whatever the temperature. Bundled up, I feel only an intense and overheated claustrophobia, which robs the air from my lungs and makes me sweat so that the bed feels like a stagnant pool I’m condemned to bathe in.

  As I stew in my bed, I listen to the city outside: the shouting of strangers, cars, a moped, a siren, the rustle of treetops agitated by the wind, sometimes nothing at all. A sound void.

  There are nights when this quiet torments me and I rise, usually well beyond midnight, and I dress again, and then I walk the streets under the sodium-orange glow of the streetlights, where the only life is a shadowy turbulence at the periphery of my vision, a fox perhaps, or a broken man in a doorway.

  But even walking can’t clear my mind completely because as I put one foot in front of the next I dread even more the return to the flat, to the bed, to its emptiness, to my wakefulness.

  And, worst of all, I dread the thoughts that will circle once again in my mind.

  They take me straight to those dark, vivid places that I’ve worked so hard to lock away during the day. They find those hidden places and they pick the locks, force the doors, pull away the planks of wood that have been nailed across the windows, and they let light into the dark corners inside. I think of it as harshly lit, like a crime scene. Center stage: Benedict Finch. His pellucid blue eyes meeting mine, and in them an expression so innocent that it feels like an accusation.

  Late into the small hours I sometimes get the sleep I crave, but the problem is that it’s not a refreshing blackness, a chance for my mind to shut down. Even my sleep allows me no respite, because it’s populated by nightmares.

  But whether I’ve been awake or asleep, when I rise in the morning, I’m often fetid and dehydrated, wrung out before the day has even begun. Tears might have dampened my pillow, and more often than not sweat has soaked my sheets, and I face the morning with a sense of dread that my insomnia hasn’t just blurred the boundaries between day and night, but has unbalanced me too.

  I think, before it happened to me, that I might have underestimated both the restorative power of sleep and the destructive power of a shattered psyche. I didn’t realize that exhaustion could bleed you dry so completely. I didn’t realize that your mind could fall sick without your even noticing: incrementally, darkly, irrevocably.

  I’m too embarrassed to tell anybody else about these things, and the fact that the effects of my insomnia stay with me as day breaks, woven into the fabric of it. The exhaustion it breeds makes my coffee taste metallic and the thought of food intolerable. It makes me crave a cigarette when I wake. It fuels my cycle ride to work with adrenaline, so that I’m nervy, riding dangerously close to the curb, misjudging a junction so that the thud of a car forced into an emergency stop just behind me makes my legs pump painfully fast on the pedals.

  In the office, an early meeting: “Are you OK?” my DCI asks. I nod, but I can feel sweat breaking out along my hairline. “I’m fine,” I say. I last for ten minutes more, until somebody asks, “What do you think, Jim?”

  I should relish the question. It’s an opportunity to put myself forward, to prove myself. A year ago, I would have. Now I focus on the chipped plastic shard on the end of my pen. Through the pall of my exhaustion I have to force myself to raise my head and look at the three expectant faces around me. All I can think about is how the insomnia has smeared the clarity of my mind. I feel panic spreading through my body as if infused like a drug, pushing through arteries, veins, and capillaries until it incapacitates me. I leave the room silently and once I’m outside I pound my fist into the wall until my knuckles bleed.

  It’s not the first time it’s happened, but it’s the first time they make good on their threat to refer me to a psychologist.

  Her name is Dr. Francesca Manelli. They make it clear that if I don’t attend all sessions, and contribute positively to the discussions with Dr. Manelli, then I’m out of CID.

  We have a preliminary meeting. She wants me to write a report on the Benedict Finch case. I start it by writing down my objections.

  Report for Dr. Francesca Manelli on the Events Surrounding the Benedict Finch Case by DI JAMES CLEMO, Avon and Somerset Constabulary

  CONFIDENTIAL

  I’d like to start this report by formally noting down the objection that I have both to writing it and to attending therapy sessions with Dr. Manelli. While I believe that the Force Occupational Health Service is a valuable asset, I also believe that use of it should be discretionary for officers and other staff. I shall be raising this objection formally through the proper channels.

  I recognize that the purpose of the report is to describe the events that occurred during the investigation of the Benedict Finch case from my own point of view. This will provide the basis for discussion between myself and Dr. Manelli, with the aim of ascertaining whether it will be useful for me to have long-term support from her in dealing with some of the issues that arose from my involvement in that case, and some personal issues that affected me at around that time also.

  I understand that I should include details of my personal life where relevant, including where it relates to DC Emma Zhang, as this will allow Dr. Manelli to form a whole view of my decision-making processes and motivations during the period that the case was live. The progress of my report will be reviewed by Dr. Manelli as it’s written, and what I produce each week will form the basis for my talking sessions with Dr. Manelli.

  Dr. Manelli has advised that the bulk of this report should be a description of my personal recollections of what took place, though it may also include transcripts of our conversations or other material where she feels that is appropriate.

  I agree to do this only on the understanding that the contents of this report will remain confidential.

  DI James Clemo

  BEFORE

  DAY 1

  SUNDAY, OCTOBER 21, 2012 />
  In the UK, a child is reported missing every three minutes.

  —www.missingkids.co.uk

  The first three hours are most critical when

  trying to locate a missing child.

  —www.missingkids.com/keyfacts

  RACHEL

  My ex-husband’s name is John. His new wife is called Katrina. She’s petite. She has a figure that can make most men drink her in with their eyes. Her deep brown hair always looks shiny and freshly colored, like hair in magazines. She wears it in a bob, and it’s always carefully styled around her pixie face, framing a pert mouth and dark eyes.

  When I first met her, at a hospital function that John was hosting, months before he left us, I admired those eyes. I thought they were lively and sparky. They flashed around the room, assessing and flirting, teasing and charming. After John had gone, I thought of them as magpie eyes, darting and furtive, foraging for other people’s treasure to line her nest.

  John walked out of our family home on Boxing Day. For Christmas he’d given me an iPad and Ben a puppy. I felt the gifts were thoughtful and generous until I watched him back his car out of the driveway that day, neatly packed bags stowed on the backseat, while the ham went cold on the dining table and Ben cried because he didn’t understand what was happening. When I finally turned and went back into the house to start my new life as a single mother, I realized that they were guilt-gifts: things to fill the void he would leave in our lives.

  They certainly occupied us in the short term, but perhaps not as John intended. The day after Boxing Day, Ben appropriated the iPad and I spent hours standing under an umbrella in the garden, shivering, shocked, while the new Cath Kidston Christmas slippers my sister had sent me got rain-soaked and muddy, and the puppy worked relentlessly to pull up a clematis when I should have been encouraging it to pee.

  Katrina lured John away from us just ten months before Ben disappeared. I thought of it as a master plan that she executed: The Seduction and Theft of My Husband. I didn’t know the detail of how they kindled their affair but to me it felt like a plot from a bad medical drama. He had the real-life role of consultant pediatric surgeon; she was a newly qualified nutritionist.