Gilly MacMillan - What She Knew

The house had been in a total state when we moved in. John, who’d viewed it because he was paying for some of it, advised me not to buy it. Horrible dark colours and tacky plastic cupboards had put off many people, but I could see that underneath the tat and the tack there were some pretty, original features and I’d been excited by their potential. I’d tackled Ben’s bedroom first. Ben and I had spent a brilliant day putting the first coat of paint over the horrible dark maroon colour left by the previous owners.

‘Go on,’ I’d said to Ben, ‘just slap the paint on.’

‘What, anywhere?’ he’d asked, hardly believing his luck, a wide smile dimpling his cheeks.

‘Anywhere,’ I’d said, and to prove my point I’d dipped my brush in the tub of pristine white undercoat and written ‘BEN’ in huge capital letters on the wall. He’d loved the forbidden thrill of painting all over the walls, and he’d quickly got into it. We’d drawn pictures, written silly words and had much fun until the room was covered in a patchy layer of undercoat.

It had felt good for both of us: we were taking possession of the house. The plan had backfired a bit because we never quite managed to smooth the wall out afterwards, and even now that there were two coats of pale blue covering the undercoat it was possible to make out raised areas where some of our pictures and words had been. Neither of us minded that though. In fact we liked it.

Remembering, I eased my body down into the dent in his mattress that had taken on my shape now, obliterating his, and I touched the wall, feeling for those raised areas of paint.

I tried to make myself focus, to think through what had happened in the woods, to recover every detail. I was desperate to discover, somewhere in my mind, something significant, but I remembered nothing new.

Then I thought about John, driving the streets, desperately searching for Ben, and I thought about Katrina, and I regretted every moment that I’d let Ben be with them over the past year, and not with me.

She hadn’t even wanted him in their home at first. That had been clear from what Ben had told me. ‘She doesn’t let me slide on the floor in the hall,’ he’d complained, and I’d been furious, imagining him tiptoeing through their perfect house, unable to relax in case he did something wrong. I recalled Ben’s reluctance to spend weekends with them after the break-up, especially at first, when things still felt raw, and unstable. I came bitterly to my usual conclusion that Katrina didn’t deserve Ben, and I didn’t deserve to have to go through her to get to John.

My thoughts circulated fruitlessly like this until finally sleep coshed me, knocked me into my unconscious, where I dreamed of being surrounded by looming trees and by foliage with sharp edges, and shadows and dark tunnels where you could get lost for ever.

In the small hours I woke up and reached for my phone. I opened the internet browser and Googled ‘News Benedict Finch’. When the results came up I only needed one or two clicks before a feeling of dread coursed icily through me.

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 not a good day on the case for you, your second day?

JC: No. It’s not what I would have wanted, but you pick yourself up, keep on going, try to put things right. By the end of the day we had lots to think about.

FM: I wonder if you feel that the press conference knocked your confidence?

JC: Because of what the mother did?

FM: Yes.

JC: No. It didn’t. I’d make that call again. Nobody could have predicted that she was going to do what she did. If I’m honest, I didn’t think it was fair for me to take the rap for it.

FM: Did you say that to DCI Fraser?

JC: No. I’m proud, I’m not suicidal. She was just venting anyway. That’s what she’s like so I didn’t take it too seriously.

FM: How was the case progressing overall?

JC: We had stuff going on. We all sat down together at about eight thirty that night. Fraser was still bitching and moaning about the press conference to start off with but she settled down because we had a few obvious leads so there was a feeling that we might be getting somewhere.

FM: What were the leads?

JC: We were still looking into the fantasy role-play folks. The majority had alibis, but one of them in particular was being difficult, refusing to answer questions, and that got Fraser’s goat. He didn’t have an alibi and she liked him for the abduction.

FM: How was he being difficult?

JC: He claimed that the only authority he would recognise was the Order of Knights who ruled his fantasy world, which basically meant that he refused to talk to us. Wouldn’t answer any questions. On a point of principle.

FM: Is that allowed?

JC: He can claim what he likes and we couldn’t make him talk to us. Fraser decided to interview him herself. She wanted Woodley and me to go with her the next day, pay him a visit at home and see if we couldn’t shake something out of him.

FM: And the paedophile? The one you were trying to trace?

JC: He was a definite concern. We still didn’t have a location for him, but the DC who was on the case reckoned his mum knew where he was and it was eating her up not telling us. She was going to pay her another visit. We had the psychologist working on possible profiles for abductors and other than that we were drawing up lists of people to interview, checking alibis and responding to all the calls that had come in after our appeals.

FM: Did you have a large response?

JC: Huge, almost overwhelming. Fraser had pulled together as big a team as she could but it was still going to be hard to follow up everything quickly. As a priority, we needed IDs on the cyclists Rachel Jenner mentioned seeing in the woods and the lone male walker, so we were focusing on those.

FM: What was the atmosphere like amongst the team?

JC: Totally adrenalised. Everyone wanted to get on with it, find the kid.

FM: Had there been a public reaction to the press conference?

JC: That was an issue. Even that first night there was already a massive online backlash against Rachel Jenner. People were saying, or insinuating, everything under the sun, online news sites included. We were dreading the headlines the next morning.

FM: What kind of things were they saying?

JC: The straplines were ‘Mother’s angry outburst’ that kind of thing. Not too bad yet but it was the comments that people were making that were worrying us. On Facebook hundreds of people were discussing the case and they weren’t holding back. They thought she was guilty.

FM: And what did you think?

JC: Couldn’t rule it out. She certainly had the opportunity to do something to Ben, and we hadn’t verified her story yet.

FM: What was your gut instinct?

JC: That she was volatile.

FM: Meaning?

JC: She could have done it.

FM: You weren’t convinced of her innocence after her display of grief at the press conference?

JC: Grief isn’t proof of innocence. If she’d done something to Ben she could still have been feeling distress.

FM: True.

JC: I felt she could have murdered him, or killed him by mistake, and hidden the body and made up the story about the woods. It’s a pretty unlikely scenario but by no means impossible. We asked the forensic psychologist to look at the footage from the conference and give us his thoughts about Rachel Jenner.