The Wrong Hand

by Jane Jago

  The stricken father stared up into the blackness, a mist of rain collecting on the hairs of his exposed forearms. His son was out there somewhere, in the cold and the wet, terrified and lost, or worse. He couldn’t bear to think of him lying hurt, calling for his parents. ‘God! Please bring him back to us. Please, God, don’t let anyone hurt him.’

  Detective Kendall, Friday, 3 September 1993, 10.30 p.m.

  The team of detectives huddled around the video console in the Regency Arcade’s CCTV control room, where they had gathered to review all footage recorded that day throughout the centre. Starting with tapes that covered the hour surrounding Benjamin’s disappearance, the officers scanned each passing frame, searching the jumpy footage for the Allens – or potential predators.

  ‘There! Top right corner, just coming into the ground-floor level,’ called a young man, touching his finger to the screen. The paused image shuddered as he traced the outline of a small child in a dark anorak, walking alongside a slender woman in jeans and a light pullover. The pair appeared throughout the subsequent footage at various points along the route Phillip Kendall had plotted earlier, in his walkthrough with the distraught mother. He circled the exact locations on the centre’s floorplan and flipped the lid on his takeaway, wolfing down a few mouthfuls while another cassette was inserted.

  Several minutes into the new tape, uploaded from a central camera point, Benjamin Allen finally reappeared.

  ‘Hold it there.’ Kendall noted the time signature: 4:41 p.m. ‘Play it,’ he said, folding his arms and leaning forward as he studied the ghost-like image. He found it hard to believe what he was seeing. There on the screen an indistinct little figure, wearing trousers and a jacket, with what looked like two older boys. One held the child’s hand and led him forward, the other stood rear guard, off to one side – occasionally obscuring the toddler’s outline.

  At Kendall’s request the footage was replayed. He watched closely as Benjamin was led towards the exit and out of video range. Why would two children take another child? His fellow officers shared his disbelief, silently floored as they realized they were not looking for an adult paedophile but for two young boys, mere children themselves.

  Rachel and Mathew, Saturday, 4 September 1993

  They sat motionless on the tartan settee in their modest living room, watching in numb disbelief as a headshot of their only child’s smiling face filled the television screen. A crumpled copy of the Herald lay on the couch between them. Above a grainy enlargement of a squat figure in an Adidas pullover, and a taller child in a hooded jacket, who held the hand of a toddler, the headline screamed, ‘WANTED.’ Below the photo a second headline asked, ‘DO YOU KNOW THESE BOYS?’ The images were so indistinct that they might have featured almost any neighbourhood kids from eight to fourteen. The newsreader called for information from ‘anyone who saw Benjamin Allen at the Regency Arcade Shopping Centre yesterday, or in the surrounding districts’. Overnight, pictures taken from the CCTV footage had been broadcast on all the local and national TV networks and ultimately beamed across the world.

  By the time Phillip Kendall arrived at the Allen house, hundreds of phone calls had been logged: neighbours reporting troublesome kids, shopkeepers providing descriptions of regular truants, several mothers even suspecting their own sons. When Rachel’s sister Julia ushered him into the room, the detective sat down opposite the couple. As he politely declined a cup of tea, Rachel searched his face for information, simultaneously willing him not to speak. She looked away.

  ‘We don’t know anything new,’ he said.

  Rachel began to sob.

  ‘We’ve received dozens of calls, and we’re taking them all seriously.’

  Mathew reached over and held his wife’s hand.

  ‘Several people claim to have seen Benjamin in the network of streets between the Regency Arcade and Battery Cove. We have intensified our search. Dozens of officers are out interviewing residents in the area.’

  ‘Was he all right? Did they say if he was hurt?’ asked Mathew.

  ‘Witnesses report seeing him in the company of two older boys. Descriptions vary, but there is no point reading too much into any one statement until we have carefully checked each one.’

  ‘What about these boys? Doesn’t anyone know them?’

  Rachel wiped her eyes and waited for the answer to her husband’s question.

  ‘We’ve had hundreds of calls from people who believe they do. I’m waiting on a comprehensive list of absentees from all the schools in the greater Henswick area. We’ll check every one.’

  ‘We’re going insane here!’ cried Rachel.

  Kendall nodded sympathetically. ‘At this point we need you to stay at home. As difficult as it sounds, you should get some sleep.’

  ‘We can’t just wait here!’

  ‘If you think of anything that might help or you need to talk to a member of my team at any time . . .’ He handed Mathew a card listing phone numbers, the same card he had given the couple a few hours earlier when he had delivered them home. ‘A direct appeal to the public is something you need to consider.’

  Rachel Allen buried her head under her husband’s arm and began to cry.

  Phillip Kendall saw himself out and noted the collection of framed family snapshots that lined the canary-yellow hallway. As the hours passed it became less and less likely that the children who had taken Benjamin were acting alone. His heart felt heavy with dread at the prospects for a defenceless toddler who had been delivered into the hands of persons unknown.

  Detective Kendall, Sunday, 5 September 1993

  The Central District police station was buzzing with activity. In the austere conference room a long bank of tables flanked the wall. A battery of policemen and -women answered the incoming telephone calls, furiously recording information on the printed forms in front of them. Two detectives studied and correlated details from the constables’ notes, then passed them to a typist for transcribing.

  Out in the hallway Phillip Kendall spoke quietly to Rachel Allen about a televised appeal to the public. A fair-haired female detective handed him a lengthy faxed document. It was a list of absentees from every school in the district on Friday, 3 September. A male officer appeared at the doorway of the conference room and passed him a sheet of paper, an update of reports from the public. Phillip Kendall scanned the list of locations and sightings. He noted the names provided by callers who claimed to know the identity of the two boys in the pictures.

  ‘What is it?’ asked Rachel.

  ‘More information from the public that needs verifying.’ He turned to the blonde detective, who still waited patiently. ‘Roslyn, if you could sit with Mrs Allen for a while and take her through what she should say in her appeal, I’ll go and make a few phone calls. Maybe get her some lunch.’

  ‘I don’t want anything to eat.’

  ‘Or a cup of tea.’ A mobile phone rang. Kendall apologized as he reached inside his suit jacket and retrieved the bulky article from its holster. He excused himself with a nod and turned away to take the call.

  Rachel looked off into the distance as Detective Roslyn Teagues began to repeat the likely procedure for any televised appeal. At the end of the hallway, near the head of the stairs, a knot of people had formed around three uniformed officers who had just entered the building.

  ‘I’ll be there in five minutes,’ said Kendall, and returned his phone to his belt. He registered the scene at the end of the hallway immediately. He shot a look at his female colleague and gestured with an inclination of his head towards the doorway of a nearby room.

  ‘Perhaps we can go in here and get a cup of tea,’ suggested Roslyn.

  Rachel glanced at her, then up the hall at the advancing contingent of police. ‘What’s going on?’ she asked.

  Kendall walked away from her towards the group, then ushered his team into his office and closed the door.

  ‘What was all that about?’ said Rachel, standing up.

  ‘I don’t know.
It may not be about Benjamin.’

  ‘They’ve found him!’ she cried. ‘They’ve found him.’

  Several seconds passed before Phillip Kendall emerged from his office and walked back up the hall. His mind involuntarily counted off the steps: thirteen. It was one of the longest journeys of his life.

  Christine Harris, Sunday, 5 September 1993, 5 p.m.

  She peered again at the blurred photograph of the two boys on the news-stand. A draught chilled the back of her neck as she pumped several litres of petrol into her car. She had seen the same picture on the news last night. The more she looked at it, the more she became convinced that the Adidas windcheater was the same as one she had bought Graham a few months ago. He had lent it to Danny Simpson when he had stayed over and, typically, he had never given it back. There were probably lots of striped Adidas windcheaters out there, but Danny Simpson was a little shit for sure.

  ‘Oh!’ Christine stepped back to avoid the drops of petrol spilling out from the nozzle onto her new shoes. ‘For God’s sake.’ A light drizzle irritated her face as she ran towards the petrol station’s kiosk. Inside she picked up a copy of the Evening Sun and paid for it, along with her fuel. Thank God Graham wasn’t hanging around with that Simpson kid any more – not since she had found cigarette butts in the backyard and Graham had confessed that Danny had tried to make him smoke one. She had soon put a stop to that.

  She drove as far as the next set of traffic lights, then pulled over. Up ahead there was a small shopping plaza and a single payphone. She slipped the folded newspaper under her arm and stepped out into the downpour. In the booth her breath condensed on the cold glass. She turned the soggy front page of the paper and dialled the Benjamin Allen hotline number. ‘The boy in the Adidas windcheater looks like Danny Simpson, a local troublemaker if ever there was one.’

  ‘Do you know his address?’

  ‘He lives on the Sunnybank Housing Commission estate.’ She hung up. It did not occur to her that the taller boy in the picture, hiding under his heavy jacket, was her own son.

  Ewan Allen, Sunday, 5 September 1993, 8 p.m.

  Clutching the cracked army-belt at the waistband of his work shorts, knees trembling, Ewan Allen stepped back from the mobile gurney as a sheet was reverently peeled away by a pale-faced officer. The shrouded form in front of him was barely recognizable as the body of his tiny nephew, or as that of any of other child, for that matter. It was the small feet, delicate and intact, one bare, the other still encased in its miniature shoe and bloodied sock that destroyed him: the contrast between the merciless cruelty that had rained down on the tiny body and the footwear placed where a loving mother had put them, never knowing she was dressing her child for the last time.

  He could not fit the scene before him into his conscious mind. He concentrated only on the foot and the thought that Mathew and Rachel must never see the body, and prayed that one day he, too, might be able to remember Benjamin as he was before.

  Danny, Monday, 6 September 1993, 9.02 a.m.

  A thickening crowd gathered outside the Regency Arcade Shopping Centre where, overnight, an impromptu memorial had sprung up at the western entrance. Appalled residents had deposited bunches of flowers, soft toys and messages of grief and condolence. In an act of morbid curiosity, Danny had taken a ragged teddy bear from the wreckage in his toy box and brought it to place among the other tributes. It appeared that half of Henswick was wandering about in a state of shock. And there, among them, mingling with the crowd, was a pudgy-faced eleven-year-old boy on his roundabout way to school.

  Rachel and Mathew, 16 September 1993

  The broken couple stumbled through the arrangements for their son’s funeral like sleepwalkers. The scale of their pain was so great they were almost beyond feeling it. Hundreds of people from the local community attended the service, many of whom they did not know. When his father and uncles carried Benjamin’s tiny white coffin from the chapel, a featherweight on their shoulders, Rachel could barely stand. Mathew remained upright, stoical throughout.

  Returning to the little house in the Terrace without him had been the moment of reckoning. The house was unbearably still and silent. A red plastic tricycle was parked where Benjamin had left it under the phone table in the hall. Recollections of joy, of what had been stolen from them, were nearly as cruel as the knowledge of what they had been unable to protect him from. Hardest of all was the abrupt severing of the future, the annihilation of every hope and dream they had once shared.

  On the first night, after they had told Rachel her baby was dead, she had gone to his room, and curled up across his empty bed, cradling his pillow to her chest. As she breathed in his smell she had willed herself to imagine that it wasn’t true, that the nightmare hadn’t happened, that Benjamin had wandered off and given them all a terrible fright, but now he was safe in her arms, his head under her chin.

  Now, as she moved about the house in a daze, every room held something of Benjamin, frozen moments of his life. His striped pyjama bottoms stuffed into the laundry hamper. An opened fruit yoghurt in the fridge, with the spoon sticking out. Everything reminded her that his life had stopped for ever. In the yard one of his red T-shirts flapped on a pole above the timber fort. Mathew had built the tree house last Christmas, with Benjamin shadowing his every move. A tin of coloured markers still lay open on the play desk in the sunroom. The drawing next to it was a mass of circular orange scribbles above four furry black legs. And there was the orange marker, abandoned without its lid when Benjamin’s attention had moved to something else. She picked it up. The tip was bone dry – he was always leaving the tops off. There it was, under the table. As she knelt down to retrieve it from the litter of picture books and toys, something gave way inside her and she clutched the pen to her breast and wept uncontrollably. The nightmare was the reality.

  Names

  ‘Whose names are not written’

  Detective Kendall, 2008

  Lauren tiptoed barefoot down the hall. When she quietly pushed open the door to her father’s room, the bed was empty. She eventually found him sitting on a bench beside his vegetable patch in the back garden, staring into the distance, apparently meditating on the worn timber sleepers that edged the path. His face was drained of colour and his lips were almost blue.

  ‘What’s wrong, Dad?’

  He coughed into his handkerchief. ‘A rough night . . . I’m just a bit tired that’s all.’

  She returned a few minutes later with a tray holding a pot of tea and a copy of the Sunday Globe. She held out a cup.

  ‘Not now, I just want to sit here for a while. I’ll be in in a minute.’ Reluctantly she left him alone.

  A squadron of white moths appeared, flitting among the silver beet leaves and dropping their eggs onto the budding heads of the young broccoli. He hadn’t dusted it for weeks and couldn’t raise the enthusiasm to shoo them away now. He watched indifferently, feeling desperately useless, already gone from the world.

  He looked at the newspaper on the tray beside him, unfolded it and scanned the headlines. ‘MEDIA MAGNATE MOURNED’. He allowed himself a little laugh. ‘RACE FIX EXPOSED’. In the features bar at the top of the page he saw the small printed image of a familiar face. ‘IDENTITY THEFT. Is Cyberspace Safe? Part II by Alex Reiser.’

  A flare of hope lit inside him as he remembered the bombastic journalist who had reported on the Allen case. Despite Kendall’s deep-rooted professionalism, Reiser had become almost a friend after earning his respect with his incisive coverage of the case. With so much vitriol written about it, he had been the first to question the culpability of a society that had spawned a pair of children so desensitized that they could imagine, let alone carry out, such a brutal killing.

  His investigation into the backgrounds of Harris and Simpson had pulled no punches. His arguments for social influences were persuasive, even to those involved with the case, but when Kendall had looked into the eyes of Danny Simpson, as his lips had formed the lies conceived to save
him from punishment for his crime, he could not help but see a purer form of evil, one that took pleasure in causing harm and deceiving others. He could not find it in himself to compare the two psychologically deformed children with other socially deprived delinquents. He didn’t want to: he had seen at first-hand exactly what they were capable of.

  As his body began to fail and death drew nearer, it gave Kendall comfort to tie off the details of his life, signing his property over to his daughter, finalizing his will, and shredding years of case notes and papers. It was hard for Lauren to watch as he sat at his desk in the sunroom, using what energy he had left to jot farewell notes to friends, each including some memory or shared joke. He shook his wrist to revive the blood flow and finished off one last note. He added it to the top of his pile. Then, as an afterthought, he took another sheet of paper and copied down some names from his Teledex. He slipped the list inside one of the folded letters and put his pen aside.

  ‘I have to go, Dad,’ said Lauren, coming into the room. ‘I’ll be back at six.’ She kissed his forehead. ‘I’ve got the mobile.’

  ‘Of course you have.’

  ‘You should lie down.’

  ‘I will.’

  He observed her through the window, pulling the bins onto the street before getting into her car. He felt a trace of guilt that the prospect of leaving her alone in the world bothered him much less than he would once have imagined. She was strong and loving. She would always make the best of things, and financially she would never have to worry – he had seen to that. There were far worse things for a parent than to predecease his child.

  Catherine, 2008

  Standing at a bank of payphones outside the Avondale Street post office, Catherine addressed a bundle of stamped A4 envelopes: Glasgow and West Scotland Family History Society, Glasgow Genealogical Society, Glasgow City Archives, Births, Marriages and Deaths. That done, she turned her attention to the pile of regional phone directories stacked on the adjacent counter. She dug through the tattered pile, extracted one and let it flop open. She found the Ds and began searching for ‘Douglass’. Her eyes followed her index finger as it travelled rapidly down the lists. There were hundreds of Douglases with one s but only fifty-odd with two. Five of those were J. Douglasses. Her finger stopped below ‘Douglass, J. S., 3/12 Windsor Rd, Richmond’. She picked up the handset, her heartbeat accelerating as she dialled the number.