Gilly MacMillan - What She Knew

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.’

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.